Newsletter delivery like a dabbawala

Every day in the Indian city of Mumbai, 200,000 lunches are picked up from office workers’ homes and delivered to the workers’ desks precisely at lunchtime.

Then in the afternoon, the whole thing is reversed, with the empty boxes (called tiffin boxes) returned to the workers’ homes in the afternoon.

And here’s the amazing thing. The 5,000 “dabbawalas” make only one mistake out of every six million lunches delivered.

If only the postal service were that reliable!

The dabbawalas form a network of trusted and knowledgeable couriers, distribution hubs and delivery routes, together with a system that codes each lunchbox with its source and destination, to ensure such an outstanding delivery record. By bike, train or foot – nothing gets misplaced and nothing is late.

You can see them in action in a charming movie, called The Lunchbox. I watched it this week.

I was only partly joking about the postal service.

Yes, it no doubt makes more mistakes.

But you can also get pinpoint delivery – and that’s important when it comes to delivering your newsletters.

For example, the postal service allows you to define an exact group of houses that you want to target with your newsletter.

Or…you can buy a mailing list to target people with exactly the demographics you want.

With email, you can divide your client list into segments depending on whatever criteria that makes sense to you – stage in the buying cycle, demographics, whatever.

We can assist you with all this!

Kyla, our production manager, can help you find ways to mail your newsletter efficiently.

And Mayna, our customer service manager, can help you use the VerticalResponse email sending system to segment your lists and monitor response to your newsletters.